One of the cardinal rules for any individual who has ever tried to engage with the general public is: don’t google yourself. Like those warnings against eavesdropping on private conversations lest we hear something about ourselves that we might not like, it is in many cases a rule honoured only in the breach. But when you are trying to promote your work, it’s often necessary to find out what people are saying about you – good and bad.

So far, the number of detractors has very small indeed and whilst I’m curious as to motive, I remain optimistic that their effect is minimal but, rest assured, they exist. But what gives me pause every time I look to see how my self-aggrandising contributions to various sites are being received, is a request I made about twenty months ago to a website called “Why Isn’t My Book Selling?”.

Now I can see what you’re thinking: it would be something along the lines of, “What… the… hell…!!?? Are you... mental or what???” and I would have to own that, yes, you may have a point; but what I was looking for was some practical help that might get my story ("The Circling Song") noticed and, to be fair, there were a number of helpful points made – mostly concerning the cover, as it happens; but without wishing to denigrate the site (which I certainly am not: it is a laudable idea) I think that on the whole, it was a huge mistake.

For now, every time my story or me is googled, one of the early hits picked up by search engines is this:

Marvellous. So, anyone searching for that intriguing First World War epistolary novella that everyone’s been talking about is going to come across this, frown and go back to whatever it was they were doing before the mad urge to search for the book overtook them. They most certainly won’t be wondering, “Why is it that this book didn’t sell? Is it so amazingly “out there” that I must read it immediately?” No. They will think that it didn’t sell because it was crap. Well, it isn’t crap, as it happens, but it is different; unusual; strange; hard to categorise; indeed all those things that the publishing world hates and this, I’d like to think, is why my books don’t seem to do as well as others.

I have to come to terms with the simple fact that my books are not ones that most people want to read. When I wrote my first novel, “Head Count”, my aim was to produce a story that I would enjoy: a good yarn of the kind that seemed to me were not being written any more: unpretentious, exciting and fun but at the same time, intelligent and literate. When I put it on Authonomy to gauge opinion, the first comment I got stated, “This could be Literary Fiction…” Ooh, goody, thought I: appreciation. My pleasure was short-lived. It was not long before I realized that “Head Count” fell between two stools: Not accessible enough to be an airport thriller and too much fun to be taken seriously.* Now, you’d like to think I learnt my lesson but sadly, no; for my second offering, “The Circling Song”, very well received by all who have read it, remains, as we have discovered, stumbling, lost and running low on provisions through the foothills of obscurity. With “The Rothko Room”, I threw caution to the winds and went as far as I could go with short sentences, short chapters and short words and whilst the jury is still very much out, I would not be surprised to discover that I’ve failed abysmally once more. It may be that I’m not good at self-promotion: I’m not. It may be that I don’t write in a simple, populist style: I don’t. But it may be that the sorts of stories I enjoy are the sorts of stories that just don’t get written any more. What I fear I have yet to learn is what the boiling hell do I do about it?

* I also readily admit that the book needs a revision in terms of dialogue layout. I was trying to make it as cheap as possible and this led to a certain... I believe the technical term is, "squishing too much text into too small a space".